More Than We Ever Dreamed Possible: Processor Technology for GNSS Software Receivers in the Year 2015

Computational power continues to increase at a rapid pace and unlike other areas of technology, this trend is not expected to slow down in the foreseeable future. Software GNSS receivers fully exploit these developments to steadily increase performance. Wikipedia lists 21 software receiver projects currently in progress. Mean while, more than 1,000 wideband GNSS channels can be tracked in real-time on a conventional PC. Moreover, smart phones containing multi-core central processing units (CPUs) and powerful many-core graphics processing units (GPUs) bring these super computing technologies into our embedded devices. All these developments can be exploited to produce power-efficient, customized receivers with flexible correlation schemes and more advanced positioning techniques. For example, promising techniques such as the Direct Position Estimation (DPE) paradigm or usage of tracking solutions based on particle filtering, seem to be very appealing in challenging environments but are likewise computationally quite demanding. This article sheds some light on recent processor developments and relates them to use in GNSS software radios